This invention generally relates to packet data services, and more particularly, to collecting billing data on a per-packet basis.
With the growing need for mobile data communications, which is driven by such factors as work place flexibility, connectivity, and time saving, subscribers are now requiring data services that were once offered exclusively by fixed data networks. The growth of mobile data service market is further fueled by the wide spread use of portable devices, which are equipped with radio access features that provide wireless connectivity for using mobile data services. For example, one such widely used service is an e-mail service that has become a necessity for many corporate and consumer users.
In some conventional mobile data networks, data access is provided via a circuit switched service. The circuit switched service, however, requires dedicated use of scarce radio resources during each session, even when no data is being communicated over a wireless link, such as an RF link. The requirement for such dedicated use arises mainly from long set up and signaling time required to connect and disconnect on a per-packet basis under the circuit switched arrangement. Because of limited radio resources, the network operators have been forced to bill subscribers for the duration of entire sessions without regard to the amount of data communicated over the RF link. This arrangement, however, has proven unsatisfactory both for the operators, who are required to dedicate their valuable radio resources for the entire length of sessions, and for subscribers who must pay for the entire duration of sessions, without regard to the volume of communicated data.
For billing purposes, most fixed Internet Protocol (IP) networks do not charge for usage on a per-packet basis. This is because procedures for collecting billing data on a per-packet basis require significant amount of computing capacity, with the benefits of collecting such billing data being outweigh by its complexity, specially in view of wide availability of fixed data bandwidth resources. As a result, conventional IP routers, that support billing functions, are designed with integrated traffic and billing computing resources. That is, the billing function and traffic function use the same computing resource.
In order to handle frequent traffic of small volumes of data or bursty traffic, such as those associated with browsing the Internet, packet switched networks are preferred for providing a mobile packet data service, which are defined by such standards as General Packet Radio Service (GPRS), CDPD and PPDC. Unlike the circuit switched data services, the mobile packet data services do not require dedicated use of the radio resources. For example, under the GPRS standard, each packet of data contains a destination address, providing for fast set up.
Consequently, under GPRS, CDPD and PPDC arrangements, collecting billing data on a per-packet basis has been incorporated into the corresponding standards, to allow operators to bill subscribers on a per-packet basis. Therefore, for a particular subscriber, the billing function of such mobile data service must account for each data packet handled by the traffic function, based on destination address, source address, size, etc. If the billing function and the traffic function are integrated, however, these functions end up competing for the use the same computing resource. Therefore, for a given traffic performance, a higher-end computing resource is required, if the billing and traffic functions use the same computing resource. Conversely, for a given computing resource, a lower traffic performance may be achieved, when the traffic function and billing function are integrated.
Accordingly, there exists a need to provide a simple and cost effective mobile data service that is capable of providing billing function on a per-packet basis, without adversely effecting the traffic function of the network.
The present invention addresses the above need by separating the computing resource of the billing function from that of the traffic function.
The present invention provides billing data for a packet data network on a per-packet basis by performing the traffic function using a first computing resource that processes packet traffic related information. Under the invention, the physical layer over which the data packets are transported is used to retrieve all the data packets that provide the traffic related information. A billing data function uses a second computing resource, which is independent of the first computing resource, for generating billing data on a per-packet basis resource based on the retrieved data packets.
According to some of the more detailed features of the invention, the packet data network provides a mobile packet data service, for example, under a GPRS standard. Moreover, the physical layer of the preferred embodiment is an Ethernet physical layer.